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Lost and found in Kurdistan
12.11.2007
By Susan mohammad |
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Susan
Mohammad returns to her ancestral homeland and
learns a truth about her father -- and herself.
November
12, 2007
Five words and two question marks that sum up my
childhood: Me? Canadian. My father? Kurdish.
In search of answers and a truer sense of identity,
I travelled halfway round the world to find a place
that feels like homeIt has been 18 years, but the
anger I felt toward my father is still fresh.
It was Remembrance Day, 1989. To mark the occasion
at Queen Elizabeth Public School in Kitchener, Ont.,
a few children with very ethnic names were invited
to give a speech. Although only seven, I was chosen
to speak at the school assembly. But as the ceremony
drew near, I couldn't think of anything to say. I
asked my father, an Iraqi-Kurd, for help. He was the
smartest person I knew.
With great pride that Nov. 11, I started to read.
Soon I was stumbling over words like "chemical
weapons" and "gassing." I was stuttering by the time
I got to gen-o-cide and had to stop. When I looked
up, the kindergarten students on the gym floor in
front of me were picking their noses. My cheeks were
burning. Teachers were on the edge of their seats
contorting their faces, wondering who had provided
the words. I crumpled the paper, trying to stop the
hot tears from hitting my face.
It was the first of many instances in my life when
my Kurdish heritage would leave me feeling confused
or misunderstood.
Though the Kurds are a nation of about 40 million,
they have no country, so I couldn't point to
Kurdistan on a classroom map. Nor could I open an
atlas to show my friends the Kurdistan flag. At
times the place seemed mythical, existing only on a
T-shirt I was given -- designed by my father and
emblazoned with a Kurdistan map.
In Canada, my father played the role of dad and
husband, but it was clear he was consumed by his
other life -- over there.
He'd left home for Romania in 1973 to finish school,
planning to return immediately to help in the fight
for independence. It would be 27 years before he was
back.
My father watched helplessly from the sidelines when
Saddam seized power. For years he was cut off from
his family. Had he returned home, he'd have been
killed because his family was known for breeding
generations of fierce Kurdish nationalists.
Instead, he scratched out a life in Canada, watching
the news for word of home. People were disappearing,
villages were being destroyed. My family's ancestral
farm on 400 acres of mountainous property was looted
and destroyed, our orchards burned. During the
Iran-Iraq War, our family dispersed to avoid being
killed.
Sometimes my father would send money through a
friend of a friend on a smuggling run through
Turkey. In return, we'd eventually receive letters
and family photos. On occasion, when the phone would
ring in the middle of the night, we'd go cold. We
worried about my grandmother. My father missed her
the most. He wanted to see his mother before she
died.
I don't really blame him for the speech. It was too
much for a Grade 3 student to handle, but when I'd
asked my father for help, his mind was some place
else.
A year earlier -- in 1988 -- Saddam's forces gassed
5,000 Kurds. And after Iranian journalists broke the
story, nightly newscasts revealed piles of dead
children with burnt faces lying in the street. At
last there was evidence of what was happening in
secret to the Kurds.
My father, and the tight-knit Kurdish community in
southern Ontario, believed Iraq would be condemned.
After all, the regime was the first in history to
attack its own citizens (even if Kurds in Iraq don't
consider themselves Iraqi). But the genocide
continued. To keep Saddam an ally in the Middle
East, western governments first blamed Iran for the
massacre, then ignored it altogether.
My father smoked more and ate less in those days. He
made banners and dragged me to protests on
Parliament Hill and at Queen's Park. He organized
vigils and helped tired-looking refugees find jobs
or apartments.
He barely slept. Helpless, he grew angry.
Eventually, the clan of loud, moustached men I
called my "uncles" stopped coming over. The family
we created, desperately clung to in place of the
family we'd left behind, disappeared. Just as
warring political parties back home divided
territory and fought bitterly on how to achieve
independence -- so too did the community in southern
Ontario. Even my Romanian-born mother, who had
always comforted these men with traditional meals,
was sick of it all. She'd had enough of politics
after the bloody Romanian revolution ended in 1989.
Unable to get my father to stop obsessing, she gave
up. He worked and read and smoked and watched the
news. She cooked and cleaned and was the one to clap
at my school Christmas concerts.
It was obvious there was a side to my father that I
didn't know. He had a passion, history and secrets.
I yearned to know him better and to understand
myself.
Every night I would wait for the ritual after he
arrived home hollowed from a 12-hour shift at the
creamery. After showering, he'd pour some scotch and
then sit next to me in his ratty armchair. As he
relaxed, he'd tell stories.
He told me about his father's three wives. His
grandfather, he said, had 12 wives and lived to be
120 -- despite smoking a pipe. He explained that our
family, the Mirawdaly tribe, ruled a duchy of land
before Iraq was formed. He recalled that he and his
brothers rode around their vast farm in the
mountains on dogs as big as ponies. They gorged on
figs, cherries and pomegranates. When he spoke of
mountains and peach-coloured sunsets and sleeping
next to the river, he looked peaceful.
I was both comforted and confused by the stories.
All I had seen of Kurdistan was from CNN: pictures
of the burnt children from Halabja or refugees from
the Gulf War dying in the mountains. If my family
was like royalty, why did we live in a
tangerine-carpeted, two-bedroom apartment in
Kitchener? And why was my father's PhD collecting
dust? It all seemed like so much fiction.
During my early teens, I rejected everything
Kurdish. I was fed up with Saddam's face staring at
me from pictures set on the bookcase. And I was
tired of correcting people who suggested I was
Turkish.
My father was hurt. Although he'd tried to inspire
in me a passion, the place he remembered no longer
seemed to exist. I was angry that he wanted to
bequeath the depressing, stifling cloud that plagued
his every footstep.
He urged me to go into politics to help the Kurds,
he even tried to dress me for the part. During
supremely frustrating shopping trips, he'd select
conservative suits to replace the loose jeans and
belly tops that I preferred. My father's aspirations
for me -- and the responsibilities that came with
them -- felt like a vice around my chest.
I was sick of feeling different from my Canadian
friends, who had grandparents and aunts and
holly-jolly Christmases and other family gatherings
during which they never ate on the floor.
During my feverish, teenaged years, my father and I
fought more and more as I tried to figure out who we
were.
It went something like this: I was Canadian, he was
Kurdish.
But like a good novel, I couldn't put the story
down. Almost overnight, I felt the need to go to
Kurdistan.
Watching Saddam's sentencing on television was the
clincher. It was around 3 a.m. last November when my
friends and I returned to my place after a night of
partying. We turned on the TV and there was that
face, shouting into the next day. As the tyrant
raged, I surprised myself -- and shocked my friends
-- with a dramatic outburst of tears and blubbering.
They didn't understand, but, of course, no one ever
did.
Within a month, the history-making monster would be
dead. The reporter in me wanted to dive in. For the
first time in decades in Iraq, the former regime was
not torturing or abusing Kurds. Canadians had no
clue about the Kurds. I wanted to get there and to
start telling their stories.
I was also eager to put names to the faces in our
grainy family photographs. There was so much I
wanted to know about my family, so much I wanted to
know about myself.
As my departure date approached, I was filled with
angst and adrenaline. In late May, a few days before
my departure, my father called to say he would be
joining me. I was pleased. It was a trip a long time
in the making.
Before visiting family, I spent a few weeks
reporting in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan
region.
I'd met a poet named Mahabad who had been jailed and
tortured at age 14 for writing a poem critical of
the Iraqi government.
The military found the unpublished poem when they
tore apart her home in search of her brother who was
in the Kurdish forces.
I'd also met a man from Halabja who was the sole
survivor of his immediate family after the chemical
attack. Hearing him speak of the carnage in the
bombed-out city was especially difficult. He broke
down as he told me how he'd begged Kurdish forces to
reveal the contents of the massive shovel they were
using to scoop up decomposing corpses. In this way,
he discovered the bodies of his heavily pregnant
mother and little brother.
Driving through the jagged mountains toward the
village of Kanychnar, I felt like we were entering a
different world. We'd escaped the 47-degree heat and
the honking chaos of city traffic, the crumbling
buildings and children selling gum on the street. In
their place were mules, green foothills and
picnicking families fanning Hibachis and eating
watermelon.
The narrow road twisted and turned for what felt
like an eternity before my father pointed to a river
lit by the late afternoon sun. "That's our land."
The crows' feet by his eyes deepened as he smiled
toward home. As we drew nearer, I noticed
skull-crossed markers setting off fields full of
landmines. Still, I was comforted by the beauty of
the bigger-than-anything panoramic landscape.
I was welcomed like a lost daughter. When I jumped
out of the Jeep, nine women and a herd of children
ran to kiss and hug me. My two-year-old cousin
Rowand tugged on my skirt and led me behind the farm
to the chickens and cows. Then my aunts seated me
outside with my uncles to drink beer and snack on
pistachios and olives while they went to cook
dinner. My little cousins took turns pinching my fat
and sitting in my lap.
About 50 of us sat on the floor around a mat to eat
delicious chicken stewed in pomegranate juice, fresh
herbs wrapped in naan with steamed rice and a
tomato-okra stew. Everyone laughed when my food fell
out of the naan bread onto my knees.
After dinner, things got a little bizarre. My older
cousins grabbed me, threw me under a blanket and
then started to beat me with a cloth shoe. The game,
as I eventually figured out, was to name the person
hitting me. I kept repeating the only three names I
could remember. With five full uncles and an aunt
plus several half-something's thanks to multiple
marriages, I had more than 112 first cousins on that
side of the family. Over and over I was smacked on
the butt as my family laughed and cheered. Finally I
guessed correctly. Sweating and laughing, I emerged.
At one point, from the corner of the room, my
cousins grabbed an old man to stuff under the
blanket. I was worried he would have a heart attack,
he was laughing so hard.
During my stay, we picnicked in the mountains where
we slaughtered a lamb to grill on the fire. We
danced and swam on our beach. As a sign of
affection, family members were constantly slapping,
biting and grabbing my face, arms and legs. At the
same time, the women gave me gifts of their own
jewelry. Kurdistan is a place of tough love. My
aunts also told me stories of my grandmother, who
died three years ago and whose grave I had a chance
to visit. (She passed away the day after my father
saw her on his second visit back. She was ill and
bed-ridden, but jumped out of bed to see him at a
family gathering.)
While picking grape leaves, I bonded with my
25-year-old cousin Sheelan. With my little Kurdish
and a lot of signing, she managed to convey that she
was out of her mind with worry because her
two-year-old son has heart problems and she can't
afford to send him outside the country for
treatment. I felt helpless.
I felt the same way around my cousin Hanner. Using
my laptop, I showed her pictures of my friends and
of other countries I've been to. She asked about
food in Canada, buildings in Europe and the beaches
of the Caribbean. My cousins huddled round and
peppered me with questions. It was fun at first. But
more than anything I wished I could take all those
life experiences and put them in a pill for them to
taste.
The entire clan slept outdoors on unrolled foam
mattresses. It took some getting used to, but I soon
felt part of a big loving family -- the first time
in my life I had felt that way. I watched my aunts,
uncles and cousins as they slept and noticed we all
have the same dimpled chin, thick calves and feet.
There it was -- my family tree -- sleeping under the
same stars in the same mountains our kin has been
staring at for generations.
As I drifted into peaceful sleep, I thought back to
the time in grade school that I was instructed to
draw a family tree. My father stayed up writing,
erasing and rewriting names on packing paper that
stretched longer than our dining-room table. At 2
a.m., he snapped a pencil in frustration. While my
classmates turned in single sheets with simple names
on neatly coloured oak branches, I went to school
empty handed. At the time, I wondered why my family
had to be different. Now I wouldn't trade it for the
world.
One morning, my father and I climbed a mountain to
look at the 40 acres I will inherit. As we walked,
he told me stories of his grandfather who had fought
alongside a Kurdish king during the First World War
to push back the English.
My father told me of the time my great-grandfather
got slashed during fighting. He stuffed his guts
back into his body, wrapped his waist with a cloth
belt and asked a man with a horse to take him to
hospital. When the man refused, my great-grandfather
beat him, threw him on the horse and then took them
both to hospital.
Eventually, my father admitted that at the age of
14, he had been imprisoned and tortured. Officers
beat him, cut his feet and then forced him to walk
on gravel.
As we sat on the cliff, my father pointed to the
spot by the river where he dreams of building a
house and planting olive trees.
There it all was -- my heritage, my family. No more
sorting mirage from reality. It felt like a secret
world at the corner of the Earth open to explore. In
that moment, everything made sense, even the
fantastic stories about my family, because Kurdistan
is a place that is different.
In Kurdistan, I lost track of time while connecting
to history. It's a place where people still stand in
respect when an older person enters or leaves a
room, where people are loyal to friends and value
family above all else. It's where people with few
possessions instead share a song or a poem. It's
where a nation of people have survived against all
odds. And it's all a part of me.
Ottawacitizen com
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